Helloz everybody....
Was a busy weekend. Went to this nature therapy resort called Joka. Amazing place. Nature at its best. Greenery, serene water bodies, the rocking jetty, calm breeze and slight drizze -- all these together made it one of the most memorable weekends i hv had in recent times.
To add to it all, got to see putty after a long time.
The objective of this entry is not to describe my weekend though. Initially I thought of creating another blog for my thoughts on various advertisements. But I have realised that maintaining a couple of blogs with daily updates is much much more difficult than maintaining a couple of credit cards.
Anyway, to put it succinctly, I would try and and understand why a particular advertisement is made in a certain way. Would definetely appreciate debate / suggestion on the thoughts posted here.
Coming to the point, the ad of the day is .. oh wait. actually i wd like to start it with a particular genre of ads that i get to see on tv these days. I would like to term these ads as "The consumer is a dumb ass" ads. In these kind of ads the advertisers believe that the consumer is a classy dumb ass who can't understand a thing unless the thought is crassly communicated up front. Two ads immediately come to my mind -- Nestle and Nestle again. One is for Nestle coffee while the other is for Munch.
Nestle coffee ads used to be harbinger for great ads at a point of time. I still rmr the ad where this hot babe opens up the window to a great morning with a coffee cup *of course, it is red in color* with this wonderful jingle in the background. Yes, there was romance in the ad but it was never overt and always kind of subtle with the freshness message and the best way to start a day message which were more overt. But i guess there is a change of team at Nestle and they suddenly realised that their appraisals were at stake if they don't make changes to the ad. As my boss says, in the marketing world, the most easiest thing to make is a TVC. And obviously these people set out to make one. Now comes the crucial point, they just cant recycle old stuff *give me the rain, babe and coffee any time*, so they had to come up with a different idea. Now what can this revolutionary earth shattering thought be? Their research would have showed that coffee is becoming distant from youth and having coffee is a more elderly kind of thing to do. SO, the first thing that would have struck them is let us make it cool. Now what can we do to make it cool. Let us make the romance side of it overt and push back all other attributes. AND, we have the ad where the guy asks the girl out for a cup of milk. MILK, the babe exclaims and we are shown that coffee was always the way to approach a girl. So here we have an ad with a 20+ couple (making the ad youthful is done), romance thrown in (yeah thrown in literally as i dnt really seeing it fit easily, btw, this also makes the ad relevant for the 20+) and yeah add a dash of comedy (milk ... to make a conversation.. really had me in splits) and we have a cool ad which focuses on romance between 20+.
Now why am I so critical about this ad? I am ok with the entire thought process of making coffee cooler and relevant to the youth (though I doubt if this has to be done ; the number of coffee pubs mushrooming everywhere has me in doubt. But I trust their research. If their research showed that coffee is no longer relevant to 20+, so be it). My discomfort with the ad comes with the way it has been executed. A voiceover saying that milk as a way of approaching girl sucks and that coffee is the way is not the best way in my opinion to communicate a thought. Do they think that consumers are so dumb that unless everything is put in the copy of the ad, they wouldn't get the message. Anyways, this is my take on it. The thought is good, the execution very poor.
From the stables of Nestle comes another ad which also falls in the same genre. The Rani Mukherjee walah munch ad. They had a series of ads running wherein Rani doesn't mind throwing somebody off the cliff for disturbing her while having a munch. Though i felt that ads looked a little tacky, the message they wanted to communicate was good and they didnt really spell it out. The recent set of ads are of a completely different nature. What they would have seen their research throw up is that snacks industry is one of the fastest growing segment within the foods industryand that they need to get in to it asap. Instead of creating a new brand, they can as well do it with munch would have been their thought process. So instead of a bar, we now have pieces which can be munched. The next logical step is to make the consumer believe that having a munch at home just the way you would have bhujia makes sense. And how do you think Nestle did it. They make Rani ask the consumer if the consumer has a munch at home. There are so many better ways to communicate a similar message and the only way they thought they could do this was to make consumer look like a jack ass. Whenever I look at this ad, I feel that I a good for nothing stupid to be told something so straight forward.
This approach looks good because there is absolutely no doubt of the consumer misunderstanding the communication. But the problem is that it hurts the consumers ego.
Neways, these are just my views. Would love to hear from junta who think otherwise.
~Sasak
